A poor swedish mother and housewife at the start of the last century finds hope and focus in her love of photography in this powerful drama by Jan Troell .

Troell, a Bergman-era director, reached his 78th year in the year this film was released. Unlike Bergman, who often adressed more existential ideas of human love and loneliness, Troell is renown for his realistic protrayal of the Swedish working class. Like his first film Here is your life, 'Everlasting Moments' is based on a documentary, this time one written by his wife after interviewing the real-life daughter of the real-life Maria, the heroine of this film.

The complex relationship between photographer, subject and world has been subject of some considerable films, not least Krzysztof Kies'lowski's Camera Buff, where similarly, through the camera, characters gain solace and deeper understanding of their surroundings. In Everlasting Moments Maria's observation of the beauty of her everyday gives a permanace to the transience of life.

Everlasting Moments takes a scenic route though life marked by dignity and despair. Through inituitive, unselfconsious sympathy for it's battered but unbreakable herione and the passion that sustains her, it eventually takes on an almost heartbreaking emotional intensity